Steve McQueen: the art of seeing – in pictures

Steve McQueen: the art of seeing – in pictures

In his largest show to date at the Schaulager in Switzerland, the British artist and film-maker has created a labyrinth of unsettling visual experiences – from Tricky engulfed in skunk smoke to McQueen himself spitting at his viewers and naked wrestling – with daunting, rewarding results

Video still from Exodus (1992/97) – a short super 8 work that makes a a study of difference and exile, showing two men traipsing through the streets of east London carrying plants they picked up at Columbia Road market

Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Still from Giardini (2009), McQueen's work for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, shows a world of overlooked everyday objects, as well as men cruising and kissing in Venice after dark. It stopped many biennale-goers in their tracks

Installation view of Static (2009), a discombobulating film that begins with the juddering din of a helicopter circling the Statue of Liberty, before plunging you into silence, which plays with your senses, leaving the illusion that the focus is clearer and the statue more present as the noise fades away

One of 116 slides from McQueen's Once Upon a Time series (2002), based on a set of images NASA sent to space in the 1970s to give a visual record of life on Earth in case aliens happened upon their spacecraft